Twilight arrives early (a poem)

Twilight arrives early (a poem)

Soon the street lights will defy their timersto illuminate the high-noon arterials

Daylight, meanwhile, is running on captive energyworrying all the while about how long it can hold on

The coffee’s gone coldbut the way my heart is racing it’s just as wellthis heating pad will keep me warm until I fall asleepand then I can dream up one disturbing scenario after anotherthat will disappear when I wake up tomorrow morning

I didn’t want to clean up that mess anyway

They say dreams are trying to tell us somethingwouldn’t it be easier if they came with subtitles?

Incomprehensible is incomprehensiblebut with language there’s at least something more to go by

I don’t want to have to look so hard for the easy answersMaslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?The question ‘what do you want?’ shouldn’t be necessarywhen it’s all right there on the page

That’s not the point anyway

The point is to get out of this spacewhere I’m stuck in this placeand I want to get to somewhere betterwhere none of this matters anymore

But if I can’t see the trees for the forestand you can’t see the trees for the forestmaybe we need a ranger who has a better understanding of the parkwho knows that the picnic basket is importantbut it’s not the key to everything

Tying the contents in a bundle and hanging them up in the treeisn’t a solution either—unless you want to starve the bear

Seems even Friday can’t wait for the weekend to get herethe weekend may have other ideas, I suspect

Always in demand, Saturday and Sunday have so many optionsthey can afford to be choosy

The rest of the week has to put up with everyonetalking about the weekend all week long—what they did last weekend, what they want to do next weekendwhat they would do if they had a longer weekend

Monday and Friday must get particularly annoyed by this

It’s hard to be yourself when everyone wants you to be someone elseand they can’t change the calendar any morethan we can change our personalities

It’s easy to be who you arebut hard to not have any say in the matter

Me, every day is the weekendso I lose track of timeI may remember the datebut damned if I don’t think it’s Thursdaywhen it’s still barely Wednesday

There are drawbacks to freedom

Some will say they were taught to make do with what they hadthat’s still the case—but it’s harder to do when you can’t add more fuel to the reservoir

Some choices aren’t choices at all

It’s the dark of twilight when I feel this mostespecially when the distraction of the lights in the parking lotkeep me awake past my bedtimethough I’m happy to not be having the next dreamI’ll need to clean up after when I fall asleep againafter morning coffee

The true benevolent gesture would be to offer to help me with the messbut I can see why you wouldn’t want to get involved—some messes are impossible to deal with

I could point to several in the world right now

No, I’m not concerned with lack of politenesssometimes you need to be the one who feels uncomfortableand scared about what might happen next

I’ve had enough for a couple of lifetimes nowand I know there are folks who have it a lot worse than I doand nobody’s rushing to help them

No, they have to debate and take votes firstthen maybe we can talk

Assuming we don’t get swept away in the process—because they only want to talk about the processwhich is a lot like the free market:

It may work for a while on its ownbut eventually somebody’s going to get squashed

And it’s never anybody’s fault—it’s ‘the market’

The winners are supposed to be magnanimous towards the losers—it’s called sportsmanship

Unfortunately we’re stuck with a bunch of sore winnersdriven by all that misunderappreciation and hatred

It’s no crime to hate the state you’re in—isn’t that what our entire society is built on?

If we weren’t all dissatisfied, no one would make any money—which, by the way, actually does grow on trees

You know, the ones I can’t seebecause I’m stuck here outside the forest